Join the Riot for Austerity!

Where I'm Going to Be Next

For a host of reasons, I do try to limit my travel. But I also do give talks, and I do do interviews, and this corner of the blog will tell you what's upcoming. If you'd like me to come speak, send me an email at jewishfarmer@gmail.com, and we'll see if we can work things out.

My Next Talk:

On February 16 at 3pm, I'm giving a FREE talk on the basics of food storage - why and how - at my friend Joy's store, The Olde Corner Store 133 Factory, Gallupville NY 12073. 518-872-1610. All are welcome, and Joy will be offering a discount to anyone who wants to get started in storing bulk foods.

About the Books

In case you wondered, there are two of them.

Coming out in the fall of this year, _Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front_ focuses on how families can adapt to a lower energy, hotter world - and help hold back the worst of the disaster as well.

Coming in Spring '09, _A Nation of Farmers_ co-authored with Aaron Newton explores our current agricultural situation, makes a case for a sustainable future, and draws the connections between our agriculture and our lost democracy.

Both forthcoming from New Society Publishers.

About Me

I'm a 35 year old writer and subsistence farmer, author of two forthcoming books on Peak Oil and Climate Change _Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front_ (Fall '08) and _A Nation of Farmers (And Cooks)_ (Spring '09) the latter co-authored with Aaron Newton. Both books are forthcoming from New Society Publishers.
I used to run a small, Jewish themed CSA, but now we're concentrating on subsistence agriculture, growing food and teaching others to grow food.
My training was in literature, focusing on the Renaissance and demographic and cultural crises of the 17th century. I've switched to focusing on the demographic and cultural crises of the 21st century for the moment, but retain an interest in all things literary.
In my spare time (of which there isn't much), my husband Eric and I are raising Eli (7 1/2), Simon (6), Isaiah (4) and Asher (2), and assorted critters and livestock, building an agrarian future.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

100% Emissions Reduction

One of the most important studies I've seen, coming out of a major climate change lab whose work has been used in the IPCC and other models was released yesterday. Here's the good news - the Riot for Austerity with its 90% reductions is broadly on track. Here's the bad news - it's goals are 10% too low. The only way of avoiding the critical 2 degree temperature rise is to reduce all industrial emissions worldwide by 100%. Let's repeat that sentence. We're going to see massive warming, flooding, the loss of the polar bears, etc... unless we reduce emissions by 100%.

"Andrew Weaver and colleagues at the University of Victoria in Canada say this means going well beyond the reduction of industrial emissions discussed in international negotiations.

Weaver's team used a computer model to determine how much emissions must be limited in order to avoid exceeding a 2°C increase. The model is an established tool for analysing future climate change and was used in studies cited in the IPCC's reports on climate change.

They modelled the reduction of industrial emissions below 2006 levels by between 20% and 100% by 2050. Only when emissions were entirely eliminated did the temperature increase remain below 2°C.

A 100% reduction of emissions saw temperature change stabilise at 1.5°C above the pre-industrial figure. With a 90% reduction by 2050, Weaver's model predicted that temperature change will eventually exceed 2°C compared to pre-industrial temperatures but then plateau."

and

"Tim Lenton, a climatologist at the University of East Anglia in the UK, agrees that even the most ambitious climate change policies so far proposed by governments may not go far enough. "It is overly simplistic assume we can take emissions down to 50% at 2050 and just hold them there. We already know that that's not going to work," he says.

Even with emissions halved, Lenton says carbon dioxide will continue building up in the atmosphere and temperatures will continue to rise. For temperature change to stabilise, he says industrial carbon emissions must not exceed what can be absorbed by Earth's vegetation, soil and oceans.

At the moment, about half of industrial emissions are absorbed by ocean and land carbon "sinks". But simply cutting emissions by half will not solve the problem, Lenton says, because these sinks also grow and shrink as CO2 emissions change.

"People are easily misled into thinking that 50% by 2050 is all we have to do when in fact have to continue reducing emissions afterwards, all the way down to zero," Lenton says."

Ok, everyone who thinks we can reduce emissions by 100% raise your hand. And remember no burping or farting - ever again.

Now periodically I get yelled at for daring to criticize people who don't want to make "extreme changes" for pressuring them to go further than the IPCC and national governments want to. This is considered mean. It turns out, though, that I've actually been way too warm and fuzzy, because 90% is by no means enough. This post: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/09/reallocating-wealth-from-have-nots-to.html, which I mostly mention because I think everyone who hasn't should read Auden's amazing poem was a good example of my meanness, but I've seen nothing to indicate it isn't the truth.

Is this shocking news? Not to me it isn't. This information merely confirms the aggregate data that I've been looking at. The IPCC report was wildly outdated by the time it was published, in part simply because the new science is coming in so fast, and in part because it is a political body, affected by governments. The IPCC report, for example based its assessments on linear arctic ice melt, which we now know to be wrong. It based its assessments on political expedience, which we know has nothing to do with science. It based its assessments on outer numbers, unsupported by science. And it based its assessments on the notion that our emissions would rise at a rate only 1/3 rate between 2000 and 2004. The IPCC was wrong, vastly, horribly, grievously wrong.

I don't particularly begrudge the IPCC or Al Gore their Nobel Prizes - I honestly give them credit for what they did. But the truth is that their work (and perhaps anyone's work on this matter - certainly my own) was too little, too late. We are committed. The report offers fairly faint hope - they call for all industrialized nations to rapidly reduce their emissions by 90%, while finding some realistic measure for carbon capture. The likelihood of this happening is about the same as the likelihood that we'll all be reducing our emissions to 0 - very, very tiny. That's not to say that some parts of this should not be attempted - as Mark Lynas describes in his forthcoming book _Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet_, there's a big difference between saying "we can't stop catastrophic warming" and "we can't stop it, but we can limit it." The ecological changes we make now may be the difference between a mere disaster and something out the Christian Bible, apocalypse section.

You know, here's the part where I get to validate my own readings of the data and my role as prophet. If I had something worth selling, here's where I'd say "I was absolutely right about this, and if you'd like to see more of my predictions, stock market advice and ideas, buy this booklet." The thing is, it isn't very much fun to be right on this one. Because the really bad news is this - if by some miracle we can get the political will to reduce our emissions enough to avoid turning into Venus, we're still going to spend the next decades cleaning up an increasing number of disasters. We're still going to visit the circles of Hell with no Virgil to guide us. I guess I should be excited I was right. Instead, all I can see is that I should have moved up the dates in my essay on what my children's future under climate change will look like:http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-childrens-century-part-i.html . Writing this piece made me cry, and my family felt it was overy negative - but all the data coming in suggests that in fact, I may have underestimated. Damn.

This should not be taken, however, to mean that there is no hope. The fact that we are in for a very, very rough ride does not mean that we also cannot make a large difference in just how rough and how awful things are for ourselves and our descendents. Getting carbon levels down fast is going to have to be a worldwide priority - and yesterday.

And here's the other thing I'm going to be proved right about. I am going to be proved right shortly in the fact that we don't have the time, money or resources to burn to do an enormous build out of renewables. Because such build-outs come with enormous energy costs - and they would be fueled by fossil emissions - by coal and artificial nitrogen fertilizers, by oil and natural gas. And we can't afford to do that. Today's Energy Bulletin has a post by Richard Heinberg offering up Eco-Keynsianism as a possible outcome for the post-peak, climate change future. Here's Heinberg's always-interesting commentary: http://www.energybulletin.net/35739.html, and Susan George's work on Eco-Keynsianism, which I think is very interesting, if not perhaps, right http://www.globalnetwork4justice.org/story.php?c_id=313. I would note, just as a sidebar that Bart over at EB includes Amartya Sen's claim that there has never been a famine in a democracy with a free press without noting that many people have disputed this claim, including Vandana Shiva, who notes that regions of India have undergone famine in a democracy with a free media. That's not to say that I don't agree with Bart's point about democracy - I absolutely do.

While I think some elements of EcoKeynsianism will be applied, I think there are powerful reasons why we should not be imagining a New Deal/WWII escape from this problem. I've articulated some of them here: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/04/world-war-ii-as-metaphor-part-i.html. We're running up against our own walls - the fact is that even if we could all agree to make a 90% emissions reduction, it wouldn't look like what we've been talking about - it wouldn't be so much a thing we do as things we stop doing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not imagining that the world suddenly switches, overnight, to an agrarian society, but I think the likelihood that we'll be following the ecojobs and doing the big build out is pretty small. We don't have the resources and we don't have the luxury of time or of burning coal and oil to help us manufacture enough rigid foam insulation and windmills to make the society as a whole look familiar to us.

Is that the end of the world then? No, I don't think so. Mixed in with the bad news is some good news - not enough, but some. And the good news is this - there is an alternative to the public economy and to borrowing money to put people to work on ecological projects. There is an alternative to present-day industrial society. And the answers are related - they involve a return to small scale "intermediate" technologies that are powered by human beings, animals, wood, manure, etc... They involve a world where many more people are engaged with the basics of food and shelter, caring for those who need care and tending land.

The good news is that the informal economy is significantly more robust in many ways than the formal economy, and doesn't require massive inputs of fossil fuels. It was the informal economy that kept people in the Soviet Union and Cuba alive during their social crisis - the gardens they grew, the things they bartered and sold, the local economies they produced. We have an informal economy too, but we don't rely on it very much - or at least, most middle class Americans don't. Many of my neighbors do - they cut a little firewood, sell some pumpkins around Halloween, barter some labor, do a little handyman work in the winter, babysit a neighbor's kids - all under the table. And they tend to make a passable living doing so, enough to pay the taxes, buy beer and supplement the deer and wild turkey they hunt with food.

Now there are problems in imagining 300 million Americans and 6.7 billion human beings all relying primarily on the informal economy and such informal methods of feeding their families - except that 3/4 of us actually *do* rely on that. That is, according to Teodor Shanin, the founder of Peasant Economics, only 1/4 of the world's total economy exists in the formal sector, with formally paid, documented work. The rest of us do other things. 2 billion people live by subsistence farming. Another billion survives entirely by selling off-book to their neighbors.

As Gene Logsdon puts when he writes in The Contrary Farmer's Invitation to Gardening, about "gardening to save us from the economy,"

"It seems to me that the part of 'the economy' that depends on biological processes, not industrial processes - especially food, but also renewable resources such as cotton and wool and other natural fiberts for clothing, and wood for construction, furniture and fuel - is particularly vulnerable to the volatile and chaotic conditions of the industrial manufacturing marketplace. An ear of corn grows at its own sweet pace, no matter hwo the interest rates are manipulated. Much more biological production than is now the case should be protected from this market vulnerability, and the most practical way to do so is by having more gardens. A garden economy would provide society with a much safer 'social security' than pension money sunk into volatile stock and bond markets...maybe this sub-economy could offset the money madness enough to avert a real catastrophe..." (32)

Is this any easy society to create? Of course not. It will be hard to keep our houses, it will require enormous advocacy. It will be hard to adapt our suburban and urban homes with comparatively little investment to serve us in hard times. It will be hard. It will undoubtably be disastrous for some of us.

But all of us can begin, just a little now, to put our feet on the comparatively stable ground of the informal economy - one that will never make you rich but might allow you to go on. We can begin adapting our infrastructure right now, using what we have and what we can acquire. We can pay down our mortgages a bit more each month while we've got the money and grow a bigger garden each year. We can start that cottage business and find time to do mending or bake bread and sell it, or tutor local homeschoolers. We can begin the process of creating Amish-style local economies, and teaching others how: http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/04/production-consumption-and-amish.html

And we can begin to prepare ourselves and our gardens for a changing world, remembering that even though some options are gone to us, we are still the youngest and weakest fair godmothers at the Christening - we cannot take the curse away, but maybe, just maybe, we can soften it a little.

138 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Sharon, In all honesty, I just don't see it happening, 50%, 90%, or 100%. There is not one person that I know at work or within my close or extended family that knows or cares about carbon emissions. My elected representatives are concerned about one thing--their re-election by catering to industry, the military, and those very people who neither know nor care. It's a hell of a situation.

I too wasn't terribly surprised to see this report saying that emissions have to be cut 100% and NOW. It pretty much falls in line with all the other data and reports that have come out of the observational and scientific community in the past 18 months.

I don't see anybody around me willing to do anything near 100% cuts either. I've done so much to the house that my mom and I live in, heavily insulated, tried to maximize solar gain, gone over to wood heat via a masonry heater, started growing a goodly amount of food, tried whereever possible to build knowledge and communtiy with family, neighbors, and work in these endeavors too, but it's not nearly enough. Nobody around me wants to cut out the dishwasher, the clothes dryer (though Mom has cut maybe 75% of the dryer use), go over to solar water heating if any hot water at all, cut out the traveling to eat out, start cooking with wood and solar only, if cooking at all, drop the distantly shipped supermarket food, the trips to the West Coast to see family, and above all give up their car. No, they think that technology will "save us" and even that is far down the road in their minds. The situation at work is pretty much the same.

Over the past year, I've come to see the inevitability of Peak Oil and substantial climate change as happening for sure and pretty soon. I used to think, well, ya, it's gonna happen, but we have some time. But now? No, now I feel like I'm a member of some tiny, enlightened minority that has been given the ability to see the future, to see the coming end of the world, at least as far as civilization is concerned, and almost nobody else can see it or hear it. I continue to ask myself, like some bizarre person in a horror movie, have I just "lost it", but everything I look at, the science, the scientists, the continuity of the dire reports, now going on a quarter of a century.... no, it IS all too real.

I'll continue to do what I've been doing. I'll probably begin to really turn up the volume, and if people think I'm nuts, well, they're just setting themselves up to be on the receiving end of the loudest "I told you-so" of their lives, not that will do any good by then.

I get people who can't hear it. I get people who hear it just a little and then try very hard to pretend they haven't. But every year at the end of the semester I tell all my students and the reactions are remarkable. They get scared and go "really?" and ask questions and say we'd hoped it wasn't that bad or that soon. They don't shut off, and they start mulling it over. I never get that reaction with people over 30 unless they were already basically convinced before I talked to them. I don't know if they actually DO anything about it, but they don't just shut off. I think age and generation may be part of the story.

Trust me, I know what you all mean about not believing it will happen. I'm really torn on whether I should advise people to simply concentrate on adaptation as much as possible, or on preventing the worst possible outcomes of this. Like Stephen, I feel like I'm in a tiny, tiny minority, and there's a part of me that just wants to say "go out and get ready, screw your emissions" and another part that says "it really does matter whether we pause at 500 or at 700." And it does, but sometimes it is really hard to deal with the knowledge. I love where I live - I dont want it to become Georgia.

Brian, my husband teaches the history of space exploration and environmental physics every year, and he does the same thing, and a percentage of his students also respond quite strongly. It is remarkable. But I'm noticing more and more people are getting it. Too late, of course, in some ways, but better everyone know and do what we can. Maybe in 20 years, we can consider some emissions cuts ;-P.

very few people around me seem at all concerned about ANY of this - they change a few lightbulbs and some of them buy a Prius, a few people join CSAs, and the city discusses the implementation of a greenhouse gas reduction policy ... but we're the only ones of our circle of friends to try growing a garden ourselves, much less that seriously discuss engaging in voluntary simplicity or off-grid living. we've started trying to create informal tool sharing, and promote a more tightly interwoven neighborhood existence, with baby sitting, cooking, sharing leftovers and skills and even cars.

then again, even at home, it's impossible for me alone to force huge lifestyle changes, and my partner still just hasn't bought in 100% yet. As I speak, the electric dryer is going, the dishwasher awaits a run, the bicycle's tires are flat, and i'll be driving an SUV to work in the morning, eleven miles one way, as the Southeastern drought continues.

much like Stephen B, sometimes i wonder if it's me, if i'm crazy to be so freaked, if the rest of them are right and there *will* be a tech solution emerging just in the nick of time... it's very hard to think of myself as a modern-day Noah. Not only is it actually psychologically painful to have this kind of knowledge (it feels a lot like mourning a death, on a very large, slow scale), but it's also extraordinarily difficult to face up to the ostracism and/or outright anger that you'd encounter if you really went ahead and "built the ark." if, for instance, i quit my job to take up full-time permaculture, or took out a loan to buy farmland (both of which have been sounding better and better to me all the time).

*breaking out the Roman fiddle*

can we start some kind of online club or chatspace - a support group for doomsayers surrounded by the subbornly oblivious?

Doesn't this make the Riot irrelevant? And what are you all still doing online? Isn't it time to turn it off now?

Whatever happens, my guess is we'd be better off working on our family life, our friendships, our relations with our neighbors and our spirituality than running around pulling all the plugs and crawling into our little holes of Austerity.

And I'm all for living simply that others might simply live, but 100% reductions? It's simply impossible. And therein lies the rub. Humanity is not going to save itself on the physical plane.

The politicians all know and have for a while, I'm convinced of that. They are just careful what they say in public.

Lately I've begun wondering how many famous artists have known for quite a while, but have been carefully cagey.

Talking Heads' last album (1989) has a song, "Nothing But Flowers" that sure seems to understand, and they came back together for one song for Wim Wenders "Until the End of the World" a movie about a world that ends so subtly that no one really notices until afterwards. U2 did the title song "Until the End of the World."

" ...We ate the food, we drank the wineEverybody having a good timeExcept youYou were talking about the end of the world."

Maybe I just have it on the brain and see it everywhere now, or maybethere are some nudges and winks out there, I can't convince myself either way.

I'm sad to say, this is a lot of why I'm not a 90%er. We need every ounce of reduction, as fast as possible, but right now I'm more worried metaphorically about needing a boat than about the trees cut for it contributing to the need for a boat. I don't know, maybe they aren't contradictory, maybe reductions ARE the boat. They sure are part of it - lowering reliance on the most failure-prone infrastructure elements, localizing, etc. I'd say right now enough's still uncertain that skills are the main buildable part, and the skills the 90%ers are building are fantastic and fascinating.

It's a little like getting diagnosed with a terminal illness, you are going to die, and don't know exactly how long you have to live. So what do you do with your remaining time? What's important? As for me, after reading the post, the autumn colors look brighter, the sound of my children is wonderful and I am thankful for each breath. It may sound a bit pollyanna, or new-agey....but this moment is all we've got. What do I do in each moment to be fully present right here and now, while I have food in my belly and electricity to my computer? How do I relish each moment while thinking of how to prepare my family and community for the changes to come. It all leads to the same answer: how much do I love, how much good can I do? Maybe we need a 90% INCREASE in kindness, service, mindfullness and charity. While I don't believe most people are going to change anything until they have to, I'm going to use my moments wisely, and do the best I can to serve my home and community.In the end, what else can I really do?

Can somebody please explain to me why wood heat is touted as more environmentally sound that other kinds of heat??? I don't get it. I learned in high school chemistry that wood releases more carbon atoms into the air than gas- or oil-burning. Am I mistaken? Was the wool pulled over my eyes?

What are we supposed to do, cut down all forests so that people can heat with wood instead?? Do people like this idea because of the Thoreau/Walden feeling that it evokes?

Don't take offense, anonymous. But I'm baffled. If you have a cast-iron stove that stands in the center of the house and heats that way, well, please say so. I understand that that can be efficient. But burning wood, I thought, was NOT.

What makes me cry is that I'm newly diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer (three years out from original diagnosis, mastectomy and chemo). MOdern technology and science are going to keep me alive for some time and my hope is that new meds will arrive - or new info about herbs, fruits (pomegranate extract?) etc.

I've been taking a break from reading about peak oil and climate change, but SHaron's posts are so human and so interesting that I can't keep away. However, I have to bow out of this - I have to stop thinking about it, because my life now is not about adapting to the coming changes - it's about getting to the doctor, getting my liver biopsied, my ovaries shut down with injections, my body scanned with MRI or Pet Scan or Xrays.

People with my illness are not going to make it in the future Sharon envisions. WEll, I will go down praying.

Oh yes, and to the person who says "it's like being told you have a terminal illness" - well I have been told this, and I am now much, much more in tune with the present moment. Keeping twenty pounds of pinto beans in the pantry, saving old blue jeans in the garage to cut down into boys' jeans "when peak oil hits", and riding the bus to the city to see my oncologist all seem slightly - irrelevant, if not nuts. Certainly with the diagnosis and my fatigue level it feels nuts to ride the bus when a car ride is so much easier.

And god knows how much emissions a hospital visit produces (plastic wraps on the syringes, the syringes, all the machinery and air conditioning and stuff of the modern medical system).

No, I'm not going for zero or even 90% reduction right now. I am focused on saving my own life, and making it as good as possible. In fact, I'm planning two plane trips and one car trip for the next three months. I've put off visiting family for too long; I've put off air travel for years. Now that I have this diagnosis, I am not going to stay home and miss out on seeing my family because of peak oil.

So I understand all those others who don't want to adapt.

I guess the ones who are left will just *have* to adapt - to whatever is left.

Wood burning releases carbon dioxide for sure just as burning fossil fuels do. The difference is that burning fossil fuels digs up carbon that was locked away for 10s of millions of years, raising the CO2 level in the atmosphere. Burning wood while growing more, on the other hand, simply keeps tossing the same carbon dioxide around. Into the trees, then into the stove, into the air, back into the trees. There's no net CO2 gain constantly increasing the atmospheric CO2.

But....!! Burning wood only works if we keep enough wood in the forests so that they may continue to grow. Billions and billions of people can't take wood all to heat their monster houses with or to cook with, especially if the wood is being burned in an inefficient fireplace, or even a low tech, iron wood stove.

I have a masonry heater, which is a large, stone stove, weighing about 6000 lb, that stores heat from a quick, hot fire. It's much more efficient and cleaner than most ways of burning wood. There is no long, smoldering fire generating lots of particulate pollution (smoke.)

Solar gain and learning to live with less hot water and more raw food are the first choices. Burning wood, even only taking enough from the forest to do it in a sustainable way and burned in a high efficiency, clean-burning masonry heater comes later, if at all. The masonry heater is not used to keep the house at 68 degrees either (though it's certainly powerful enough to do so.) We have less fires and keep the house somewhat cooler, using sweaters, sweatshirts, hats, and multiple comforters on the beds instead. I wish we could keep the house much colder, cutting out even more of the wood use, though not everybody in my family can take the cold the way I can, and, as I indicated in my earlier post, not everybody around me is as on-board with the need to cut back on life's extravagances yet either.

With burning wood, the devil is in the details. Take the minimum amount of wood, watch forest health above all else, burn the wood as cleanly as possible, return wood ashes to the forest. Can 6 or 7 billion people all do this? Almost certainly that is way too many, but in using wood the way I do, I'm trying to demonstrate to the people around me that using wood responsibly is possible at some level just the same.

Wow, Leila - first of all, all my prayers and good wishes on that one. It sounds to me that you are doing the exact right thing. I understand if you can't read this -I doubt I'd be thinking of the rest of the world at all, ever, so I'm awed that you are. But I do think that's a useful truth - yes, we got some bad, bad news, but I feel pretty stupid whining about it, given that you have worse.

I can't obviously speak from your place, but I sort of feel like building up stores is even more a priority - because now there's a part of me that's back to just wanting to protect my own, and if you scratch under the surface, my gut feeling is that I just want my kids to be ok. I don't know that I can do that, but I want it badly.

As for the energy used in your treatment - that's what energy is supposed to be *for* - to do the things we absolutely can't do for ourselves. Not to substitute for the things we don't want to do, but to meet *needs* rather than wants. I hope you'll use every bit of it without guilt or worry - think about all the stupider uses we've had.

Lisa, that's a question I'm struggling with this last week. Should I step out of the Riot for Austerity or not? On the one hand, it still matters even more that we not push the atmospheric carbon levels too high - on the other hand, maybe our focus needs to be on preparation, not prevention. I don't know. I'm still figuring this one out. But to the extent that a low-energy world looks very much like our future, I think that's useful. But I honestly, truly don't know whether to try and go forward with the Riot, personally, or as a project.

I honestly don't know. I'm going to write more about this soon, as soon as I figure out what I think other than...oh, crap.

Sharon, the answer for me is reduction. Of course, I'm nowhere near as low with the carbon usage as you are, and of course your answer may be different.

But it's the same reasoning as riding my bike when we have a pollution alert and are warned not to exercise outdoors; driving my car is clearly *not* the solution to air pollution, and I need to remain in solidarity with the people in our community who don't have the luxury of hiding in doors when the air gets bad.

The skills and relationships you grow with energy-use reduction are going to be just as important as any tools and improvements you can buy. They are also more mobile and more adaptive to changing circumstances.

I can't tell if my sense of despair is coming from the news, my lack of recent progress, or from finally reading The Road. But I have definitely been struggling with it lately.

Stephen B's explanation for why wood-burning does not increase atmospheric CO2 also serves to explain why -- contrary to Sharon's quip in the original post -- we could continue to burp and fart under a no-emissions regime, just as bear, bison, etc. have been happily farting all this time without affecting the climate. It also explains why 100% emissions reduction is at least theoretically possible, although Lisa may be right that human beings will never agree to do it. Back when we burned only wood or dung, we did not have a major effect on atmospheric composition.

Stephen, I'll disagree with you on the raw food idea, which I've seen a few others pushing. Humans' ancestors have been cooking their food for a couple of million years. Not only was meat safer that way, but the vast majority of high-calorie foods available to us are not easy to eat or digest without cooking. Salads and raw fruit are fine, but raw potatoes, raw grains, raw beans, or raw cassava are not. If you wish to go on living, you have to allow the use of resources to provide you with food, and that includes whatever processing is necessary to make that food healthful and nutritious.

Of course I had to check back, and I am grateful for your reply, Sharon.

In fact, I had started a compost bin in my back garden before my diagnosis, and I'm still tending to it. My children are gardening at school and have asked if we can grow things at home, too. So I plan to do that. If it means I hire somebody to prep the beds for me (which are overgrown and neglected) then so be it.

Plus in our Bay Area climate we can grow all manner of food that is so healthy - kale and broccoli. I'm doing almost all organic produce and could use some easy access to fresh organic greens and herbs. (I have rosemary and lavender and oregano but I want mint and lemon balm)

The Road - I read one paragraph excerpted in a review that has haunted me ever since. Cormac McCarthy lives in hell, not the Christian hell of demons and eternal damnation, but the New Age hell of nightmares and projections. He is a master writer. He is also stuck in a very black, horrific view of humanity. I've read quite a bit of Cormac Mccarthy this past year because of graduate MFA program, but I've consistently passed on The Road. Now I doubt I'll ever read it. I don't need the hassle.

Re the woodburning issue. Pick a unit to convert others into for comparison purposes. Let's say barrels of oil burned. Now total the equivalent "barrels of oil burned" to heat my house with wood -- including the gas used to drive to the woods, the gas burned in the chainsaw, the prorated portions of energy used to manufacture and ship and maintain the chainsaw itself and the truck we use to get out there. Convert the pollution caused by these activities, along with the pollution caused by the end-result burning of the wood itself into some oil-consumption equivalent. Add in whatever other details I've forgotten (prorated energy used to make gloves, boots, splitting maul, then subtract the energy benefits -- reduced likelihood of future medical needs -- of the exercise we get doing the cutting and splitting...). NOW do the same calculation for any OTHER way of heating -- including the materials needed for the infrastructure, manufacture, and transport of the parts and pieces, and see how that compares. I'm fairly well convinced that the only things less impactful than wood heat are passive actions (thermal mass, wearing more clothes, solar orientation, etc) as well as choosing geographical locations that don't have such extremes of climate. Using passive options is always a good idea, IMO. Going to a less extreme climate doesn't work in the sense that there are simply too many of us to live in those places without overwhelming the resources available there (such as water, etc). It's all connected, and there is no easy "right answer." But in general I see wood heat as less impactful than other options.

100% industrial reduction . . . actually, this is better than I was expecting. Maybe, depending on how they define industrial. Does anyone know where to find total emissions, the definition of 'industrial emissions' as used here, and the difference between those?

If these scientists really mean only industry, then they aren't including other comercial activities in that number. That should be a huge pile of emissions.

Even if they are including all comercial emissions, they aren't counting personal emissions.

Maybe there's enough wiggle room in there that we could do something, create a more positive future. Cut back on personal enough to keep the solar panel industry, perhaps.

Now mind, y'all, I'm still a pessimist, and people still aren't going to change. But every now and then we pessimists do get pleasently surprised.

Thank you, Stephen B., that explained a lot. (I hope you still see this, regardless of Sharon's new post.) I am not convinced that it is a solution for 6-7 billion people, but on an individual scale it makes sense.

And I'm like that you're from suburban MA. So am I. :) (This matters really only because I am not there now, and I wish I were.) My parents, on the one acre where I grew up, cultivate trees that they know will make good future burning, and they plant their own xmas trees. Unfortunately, they don't use those trees to heat the house, but in a fireplace. Well, at least they plant, I guess, and are mindful in other ways.

Help me out on this one. I just read this yesterday evening. I had trouble sleeping last night. It's the first time I've actually lost sleep over global warming. I guess I've reached my own personal tipping point. What are the stages of grief again? Denial, rage, total freakoutmeltdown?

What we have to talk about is going cold turkey on fossil fuels.Personally, I have a lot of hope that we will find some 'bridges to the future' through tree planting, ocean seeding, (or even... dare I say it?... "clean" coal). We aren't savages who don't know how to live without fossil fuels, they are just an addiction of sorts.To the person who doesn't understand about why burning wood is better than burning fossil fuels... it has to do with the carbon cycle and how the trees will relatively quickly sequester the carbon that is releaseed from us burning wood. The alternative is to burn fossil fuels, which are not replaced when we use them and add significantly to our atmosphere. Remember, it is all about *sustainable* forestry.

Eeesh, one thing I won't miss about our current techno-culture is all the SPAMDAMNERS! ;-)

Anyway, no - I also don't see much reduction happening, if any, over the next few years. The only reductions that will occur will be those forced upon us by economic pressures. That will be too little, too late to have much impact on the situation as a whole.

Personally, I've got a mental list of things I want to learn to do before it gets harder to get equipment and supplies and know-how. So I'm stepping up my used book buying, and laying in good solid tools. I'm choosing low input and non-electric means of accomplishing work whenever possible. I'm learning how to use more of what we have available locally, and learning to do without some things we can't get here. This is no where near 100% reduction, but it's what I can do right now by myself.

I'm also starting to look at the old fashioned "virtues" like temperance and self-discipline, and seeing that my own life could use a heaping helping of both. I figure I'm my own best resource, and I can't help others if I can't even help myself first. Not only that, but I've come to realize that what you put into developing your own character and skill sets is something that cannot easily be taken away from you, no matter what the future brings. What you put into your head and heart will always be yours.

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